From: jpc@tauon.ph.unimelb.edu.au (John Costella)
Subject: Re: PHIL: Will ever VR be like reality?
Date: Tue, 9 Feb 93 18:15:19 EST



> >This doesn't really help you per se; maybe when you get down to the
> >quantisation of spacetime itself (``foamy'' metric) you might be able
> >to fudge things to look real, but that's s-o-o-o far down :-).
> 
> Currently,the world's combined computing power couldn't simulate even
> a single protein for more than a few micro seconds(simulation time) to
>
> something like millions(?)  of proteins. So we won't be able to
> simulate macroscopic objects at the atomic (but classicaly) level
> until computers are something like a trillion trillion trillion times

Yup, that's what I was trying to say (not too successfully probably
:-).

In fact you can *never* simulate the whole universe because there is
not enough material in the universe to build the memory required to
even store the whole universe ... you see the problem? So I don't
think Diego will ever have to worry about being in a VR universe that
is identical to the real one---at least, not if he has a good
physicist on hand :-).

John

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John P. Costella              School of Physics, The University of Melbourne
jpc@tauon.ph.unimelb.edu.au         Tel: +61 3 543-7795, Fax: +61 3 347-4783
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